Freshmen writing

Page 1 of 7 Don ’t Blame the Eater by David Zinczenko If ever there were a newspaper headline custom -made for Jay Leno's monologue, this was it : Kids taking on McDonald's this week, suing the company for making them fat. Isn't that like middle -aged men suing Porsche for making them get speeding tickets? Whatever happened to personal responsibility? I tend to symp athize with these portly fast -food patrons, though. Maybe that's because I used to be one of them. I grew up as a typical mid -1980's latchkey kid. My parents were split up, my dad off trying to rebuild his life, my mom working long hours to make the monthl y bills. Lunch and dinner, for me, was a daily choice between McDonald's, Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken or Pizza Hut. Then as now, these were the only available options for an American kid to get an affordable meal. By age 15, I had packed 212 pounds o f torpid teenage tallow on my once lanky 5 -foot -10 frame. Then I got lucky. I went to college, joined the Navy Reserves and got involved with a health magazine. I learned how to manage my diet. But most of the teenagers who live, as I once did, on a fast -food diet won't turn their lives around: They've crossed under the golden arches to a likely fate of lifetime obesity. And the problem isn't just theirs -- it's all of ours. Before 1994, diabetes in children was generally caused by a genetic disorder -- only about 5 percent of childhood cases were obesity -related, or Type 2, diabetes. Today, according to the National Institutes of Health, Type 2 diabetes accounts for at least 30 percent of all new childhood cases of diabetes in this country. Not surprisingly, money spent to treat diabetes has skyrocketed, too. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that diabetes accounted for $2.6 billion in health care costs i n 1969. Today's number is an unbelievable $100 billion a year. Shouldn't we know better than to eat two meals a day in fast - food restaurants? That's one argument. But where, exactly, are consumers -- particularly teenagers -- supposed to find alternatives? Drive down any thoroughfare in America, and I guarantee you'll see one of our country's more than 13,000 McDonald's restaurants. Now, drive back up the block and try to find someplace to buy a grapefruit. Complicating the lack of alternatives is the lack of information about what, exactly, we're consuming. There are no calorie information charts on fast -food packaging, the way there are on grocery items. Advertisements don't carry warning labels the way tobacco ads do. Prepared foods aren't covered under Food and Drug Administration labeling laws. Some fast -food purveyors will provide calorie information on request, but even that can be hard to understand. For example, one company's Web site lists its chicken salad as containing 150 calories; the almonds an d noodles that come with it (an additional 190 calories) are listed separately. Add a serving of the 280 -calorie dressing, and you've got a healthy lunch alternative that comes in at 620 calories. But that's not all. Read the small print on the back of the dressing packet and you'll realize it actually contains 2.5 servings. If you pour what you've been served, you're suddenly up around 1,040 calories, which is half of the government's recommended daily calorie intake. And that doesn't take into account tha t 450 -calorie super -size Coke. Make fun if you will of these kids launching lawsuits against the fast -food industry, but don't be surprised if you're the next plaintiff. As with the tobacco industry, it may be only a matter of time before state governments begin to see a direct line bet ween the $1 billion that McDonald's and Burger King spend each year on advertising and their own swelling health care costs. And I'd say the industry is vulnerable. Fast -food companies are marketing to children a product with proven health hazards and no w arning labels. They would do well to protect themselves, and their customers, by providing the nutrition information people need to make informed choices about their products. Without such warnings, we'll see more sick, obese children and more angry, litig ious parents. I say, let the deep -fried chips fall where they may. Page 2 of 7 It’s Perverse, but It ’s Also Pretend by Cheryl K. Olson On Monday the Supreme Court struck down, on First Amendment grounds, California’s law barring the sale or rental of violent video games to people under 18. On a practical level, the law was vague. It was never clear which games might fall under the law, or whose job it would be to decide. But more important, the state’s case was built on assumptions — that violent games cause children psychological or neurological harm and make them more aggressive and likely to harm other people — that are not supported by evidence. In the end, the case serves only to highlight how little we know about this medium and its effects on our children. Many people assume that video game violence is consistently and unspeakably awful, that little Jacob spends most afternoons tortu ring victims to death. But these people haven’t played many video games. The state drew its examples of depravity almost exclusively from an obscure game called Postal 2, which, surveys show, is rarely played by children or young teens. The game is deliber ately outrageous; you can, for example, impale a cat on your gun as a makeshift silencer. A trailer for Postal 3, said to be out later this year, encourages players to “Tase those annoying hockey moms or shoot them in the face!” This may sound disturbing, but it’s also ridiculous. And young people know it: as one 13 -year -old said during a study I conducted at :arvard, “With video games, you know it’s fake.” In my research on middle schoolers, the most popular game series among boys was Grand Theft Auto, whi ch allows players to commit cartoon violence with chain saws as well as do perfectly benign things like deliver pizza on a scooter. Teenage boys may be more interested in the chain saws, but there’s no evidence that this leads to violent behavior in real life. F.B.I. data shows that youth violence continues to decline; it is now at its lowest rate in years, while bullying appears to be stable or decreasing. This certainly does not prove that video games are harmless.

The violent games most often played by y oung teens, like most of the Grand Theft Auto series, are rated M, for players 17 and older, for a reason and do merit parental supervision. But despite parents’ worst fears, violence in video games may be less harmful than violence in movies or on the eve ning news. It does seem reasonable that virtually acting out a murder is worse than watching one. But there is no research supporting this, and one could just as easily argue that interactivity makes games less harmful: the player controls the action, and can stop playing if he feels overwhelmed or upset. And there is much better evidence to support psychological harm from exposure to violence on TV news. In fact, such games (in moderation) may actually have some positive effects on developing minds. As the court opinion notes, traditional fairy tales are chock - full of violence; a child experiences and learns to manage fears from the safety of Mom or Dad’s lap. Similarly, a teen can try out different identities — how it feels to be a hero, a trickster, a fea red or scorned killer, or someone of a different age or sex — in the safe fantasy world of a video game. In the end, the most harmful assumption in the California law is that we know enough about the effects of video games to recommend policy solutions. (I was one of dozens of advisers for a supporting brief filed by those who challenged the law.) Almost no studies of video games and youth have been designed with policy in mind. If we want to mitigate risks of harm to our children (or the risk that our chil dren will harm others), we need research on the specific effects of the most commonly played violent games, and of playing violent games in social groups. We know virtually nothing, for instance, about how youths who are already prone to violent behavior, such as those exposed to violence at home and in their neighborhoods, use these games. Do they play them differently from the way other children do? Do they react differently? And if so, how might we limit the risks involved? We need to reframe our view of video games. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. concurred with the majority’s opinion, but with some reservations: “We should take into account the possibility that developing technology may have important societal implicati ons that will become apparent only with time,” Hustice Alito wrote. This is excellent advice, but only if we are willing to consider that video games may have potential benefits as well as potential risks. Page 3 of 7 The Earth Is Full by Thomas L. Friedman You really do have to wonder whether a few years f rom now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threa tened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once? “The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist -entrepreneur, who describ ed this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think a nd see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.” Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustai n our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth ’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “:aving only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding. This is not science fict ion. This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once. While in Yemen last year, I saw a tanker truck delivering water in the capital, Sana. Why? Because Sana could be the first big city in the world to run out o f water, within a decade. That is what happens when one generation in one country lives at 150 percent of sustainable capacity. “=f you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees,” writes Gilding. “=f you put additional nitrogen into a water s ystem, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. =f you thicken the Earth’s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with socia l, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.” =t is also current affairs. “=n China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today,” C hina’s environment minister, Zhou Shengxian, said recently. “The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave impediments to the nation’s economic and social development.” W hat China’s minister is telling us, says Gilding, is that “the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.” We will not change systems, though, without a crisis. But don’t worry, we’re getting there. We’re currently caught in two loops: One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability. At the same time, improved productivity means fewer people are needed in every factory to produce more stuff. So if we want to have more jobs, we need more factories. More factories making more stuff make more global warming, and that is where the two loops meet. But Gilding is actually an eco -optimist. As the impact of the imminent Great Disruption hits us, he says, “our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.” We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer -driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness - driven growth model, based on peop le working less and owning less. “:ow many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘= wish = had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘= wish = had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.” Sounds utopian? Gilding insists he is a realist. “We are heading for a crisis -driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake u s or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.” Page 4 of 7 Thems That ’s Not Shall Lose by Charles M. Blow “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” James Baldwin penned that line more than 50 years ago, but it seems particularly prescient tod ay, if in a different manner than its original intent. Baldwin was referring to the poor being consistently overcharged for inferior goods. But =’ve always considered that sentence in the context of the extreme psychological toll of poverty, for it is in that way that I, too, know well how expensive it is to b e poor. I know the feel of thick calluses on the bottom of shoeless feet. I know the bite of the cold breeze that slithers through a drafty house. I know the weight of constant worry over not having enough to fill a belly or fight an illness. It is in that context that I am forced to assume that if Washington politicians ever knew the sting of poverty then they have long since vanquished the memory. How else to qualify their positions? In fact, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, nearly half of all members of Congress are millionaires, and between 2008 and 2009, when most Americans were feeling the brunt of the recession, the personal wealth of members of Congress collectively increased by more than 16 percent. Must be nice. Poverty is brutal, c onsuming and unforgiving. It strikes at the soul. You defend yourself with hope, hard work and, for some, a helping hand. But these weapons grow dull in an economy on the verge of atrophy, in a job market tilting ever more toward the top and in a political environment that would sacrifice the weak to the wealthy. On Thursday, the Pew Research Center released a poll that showed how disillusioned low -income people have become. Those making less than $30,000 were the most likely to expect to be laid off or be asked to take a pay cut.

Furthermore, they were the most likely to say that they had trouble getting or paying for medical care and paying the rent or mortgage. But at least those numbers include people with incomes. A vast subset is chronically unemployed and desperately searching for work. According to the Consumer Reports Employment Index , “=n 23 of the past 24 months, lower - income Americans have lost more jobs than they have gained.” =t continues, “Meanwhile, more affluent Americans seem to be gaining more jobs than they are losing.” And the current election -cycle obsession to balance the books with a pound of flesh, which is being pushed by pitiless Republicans and accommodated by pitiful Democrats, will only multiply the pain. Until more politicians understand — or remember — what it means to be poor in this country, we are destined to f ail the least among us, and all of us will pay a heavy price for that failure. Page 5 of 7 Waiting for a School Miracle by Diane Ravitch Ten years ago, Congress adopted the No Child Left Behind legislation, mandating that all students must be proficient in reading o r mathematics by 2014 or their school would be punished. Teachers and principals have been fired and schools that were once fixtures in their community have been closed and replaced. In time, many of the new schools will close, too, unless they avoid enrolling low -performing students, like those who don’t read E nglish or are homeless or have profound disabilities. Educators know that 100 percent proficiency is impossible, given the enormous variation among students and the impact of family income on academic performance. Nevertheless, some politicians believe tha t the right combination of incentives and punishments will produce dramatic improvement. Anyone who objects to this utopian mandate, they maintain, is just making an excuse for low expectations and bad teachers. To prove that poverty doesn’t matter, politi cal leaders point to schools that have achieved stunning results in only a few years despite the poverty around them. But the accounts of miracle schools demand closer scrutiny. Usually, they are the result of statistical legerdemain. In his State of the U nion address in January, President Obama hailed the Bruce Randolph School in Denver, where the first senior class had a graduation rate of 97 percent. At a celebration in February for Teach for America’s 20th anniversary, Education Secretary Arne Duncan sang the praises of an all -male, largely black charter school in the Englewood neighborhood of C hicago, Urban Prep Academy, which replaced a high school deemed a failure. And in March, Mr. Obama and Mr. Duncan joined Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, to laud the transformation of Miami Central Senior High School. But the only miracle at these schools was a triumph of public relations. Mr. Obama’s praise for Randolph, which he said had been “one of the worst schools in Colorado,” seems misplaced. Noel Hammatt, a former teacher and instructor at Louisiana State University, looked at data from the Web site of the Colorado Department of Education. True, Randolph (originally a middle school, to which a high school was added) had a high graduation rate, but its ACT scores were far below the state average, indicating that students are not well prepared for college. In its middle school, only 21 percent were proficient or advanced in math, placing Randolph in the fifth percentile in the st ate (meaning that 95 percent of schools performed better). Only 10 percent met the state science standards. In writing and reading, the school was in the first percentile. Gary Rubinstein, an education blogger and Teach for America alumnus who has been cri tical of the program, checked Mr. Duncan’s claims about Urban Prep. Of 166 students who entered as ninth graders, only 107 graduated. Astonishingly, the state Web site showed that only 17 percent passed state tests, compared to 64 percent in the low -performing Chicago public school district. Miami Central had been “reconstituted,” meaning that the principal and half the staff members were fired. The presi dent said that “performance has skyrocketed by more than 60 percent in math,” and that graduation rates rose to 63 percent, from 36 percent. But in math, it ranks 430th out of 469 high schools in Florida. Only 56 percent of its students meet state math sta ndards, and only 16 percent met state reading standards. The graduation rate rose, but the school still ranks 431st, well below the state median graduation rate of 87 percent. The improvements at Miami Central are too small and too new to conclude that fir ing principals and teachers works. To be sure, the hyping of test -score improvements that prove to be fleeting predated the Obama administration. =n 2005, New York’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, held a news conference at Public School 33 in the Bronx to ce lebrate an astonishing 49 -point jump in the proportion of fourth grade students there who met state standards in reading. In 2004, only 34 percent reached proficiency, but in 2005, 83 percent did. It seemed too good to be true — and it was. A year later, t he proportion of fourth -graders at P.S. 33 who passed the state reading test dropped by 41 points. By 2010, the passing rate was 37 percent, nearly the same as before 2005. What is to be learned from these examples of inflated success? The news media and t he public should respond with skepticism to any claims of miraculous transformation. The achievement gap between children from different income levels exists before children enter school. Families are children’s most important educators. Our society must i nvest in parental education, prenatal care and preschool. Of cour se, schools must improve; every one should have a stable, experienced staff, adequate resources and a balanced curriculum including the arts, foreign languages, history and science. If every child arrived in school well -nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved.

And that would be a miracle. Page 6 of 7 It Has to Start with Them by Thomas L. Friedman WHEN President Obama announced his decision to surge more troops into Afghanistan in 2009, I argued that it could succeed if three things happe ned: Pakistan became a different country, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan became a different man and we succeeded at doing exactly what we claim not to be doing, that is nation -building in Afghanistan. None of that has happened, which is why I still believe our options in Afghanistan are: lose early, lose late, lose big or lose small. I vote for early and small. My wariness about Afghanistan comes from asking these three questions: When does the Middle East make you happy? How did the cold war end? What would Ronald Reagan do? Let’s look at all three. When did the Middle East make us happiest in the last few decades? That’s easy: 1) when Anwar el -Sadat made his breakthrough visit to Jerusalem; 2) when the Sunni uprising in Iraq against the pro -Al Qaeda forces turned the tide there; 3) when the Taliban r egime in Afghanistan was routed in 2001 by Afghan rebels, backed only by U.S. air power and a few hundred U.S. special forces; 4) when Israelis and Palestinians drafted a secret peace accord in Oslo; 5) when the Green Revolution happened in Iran; 6) when t he Cedar Revolution erupted in Lebanon; 7) when the democracy uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Egypt emerged; 8) when Israel unilaterally withdrew from South Lebanon and Gaza. And what do they all have in common? America had nothing to do with almost all of them . They were self -propelled by the people themselves; we did not see them coming; and most of them didn’t cost us a dime. And what does that tell you? The most important truth about the Middle East: It only puts a smile on your face when it starts with them. =f it doesn’t start with them, if they don’t have ownership of a new peace initiative, a battle or a struggle for good governance, no amount of U.S. troops kick - starting, cajoling or doling out money can make it work. And if it does start with them, they really don’t need or want us around for very long. When people own an initiative — as the original Afghan coalition that toppled the Taliban government did, as the Egyptians in Tahrir Square did, as the Egyptian and Israeli peacemakers did — they will be self -propelled and U.S. help can be an effective multiplier. When they don’t want to own it — in Afghanistan’s case, dece nt governance — or when they think we want some outcome more than they do, they will be happy to hold our coats, shake us down and sell us the same carpet over and over. As for how the cold war ended, that’s easy. =t ended when the two governments — the So viet Union and Maoist China, which provided the funding and ideology propelling our enemies — collapsed. China had a peaceful internal transformation from Maoist Communism to capitalism, and the Soviet Union had a messy move from Marxism to capitalism. End of cold war. Since then, we have increasingly found ourselves at war with another global movement: radical jihadist Islam. It is fed by money and ideology coming out of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran. The attack of 9/11 was basically a joint operation by Saudi and Pakistani nationals. The Marine and American Embassy bombings in Lebanon were believed to have been the work of Iranian agents. Yet we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, because Saudi Arabia had oil, Pakistan had nukes and Iran was too big. We hoped that this war -by-bank -shot would lead to changes in all three countries. So far, it has not. Until we break the combination of mosque, money and power in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which fuel jihadism, all we’re doing in Afghanistan is fighting the s ymptoms. The true engines propelling radical jihadist violence will still be in place. But that break requires, for starters, a new U.S. energy policy. Oh, well. George Will pointed out that Senator John McCain, a hawk on Libya and Afghanistan, asked last Sunday, “= wonder what Ronald Reagan would be saying today?” with the clear implication that Reagan would never leave wars like Libya or Afghanistan unfinished. I actually know the answer to that question. I was there. On Feb. 25, 1984, I stood on the tarm ac at the Beirut airport and watched as a parade of Marine amphibious vehicles drove right down the runway, then veered off and crossed the white sand beach, slipped into the Mediterranean and motored out of Lebanon to their mother ship. After a suicide bo mber killed 241 U.S. military personnel, Reagan realized that he was in the middle of a civil war, with an undefined objective and an elusive enemy, whose defeat was not worth the sacrifice. So he cut his losses and just walked away. He was warned of dire consequences; after all, this was the middle of the cold war with a nuclear -armed Soviet Union. We would look weak. But Reagan thought we would get weak by staying. As Reagan deftly put it at the time: “We are not bugging out. We are moving to deploy into a more defensive position.” Eight years later, the Soviet Union was in the dustbin of history, America was ascendant and Lebanon, God love the place, was still trying to sort itself out — without us. Page 7 of 7 Abandoned on the Border by Larry A. Dever THIS week President Obama toured the Southwest, in part to promote what he claims are federal advances in border security . But he has said little about the lawsuits by his administration and the America n Civil Liberties Union against Arizona’s immigration law, passed just over a year ago but still unenforced, thanks to a federal injunction. The law requires law enforcement to check the immigration status of anyone arrested for a crime if there is reasonable suspicion that the person is in this country illegally; it also allows them to cite illegal immigrants for failing to carry documents required under federal law, whether they’ve committed a crime or not. As the fight over the law, Senate Bill 1070, carries on — Gov. Jan Brewer has petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case — violent crime rooted in unchecked illegal immigrat ion continues to spread here in southern Arizona. It makes me wonder if the lawyers, judges and politicians involved grasp what it is like to be a law enforcement officer on the Mexican border. As sheriff of Cochise County I am responsible, along with my 86 deputies, for patrolling 83.5 miles of that border, as well as the 6,200 square miles of my county to the north of it — an area more than four times the size of Long Island. There is no river between Arizona and Mexico to create a natural obstacle to ill egal immigration, drug trafficking and human smuggling, and our county is a major corridor for all these. At best, illegal aliens and smugglers trespass, damage ranchers’ land, steal water and food and start fires. At worst, people who have come here hopin g for freedom and opportunity are raped or abandoned by smugglers and left to die in the desert. Nor are the migrants the only victims. Just over a year ago, while officials at the Department of Homeland Security were declaring they had secured “operationa l control” of most of the southern Arizona border, my friend Robert N. Krentz Jr., a local rancher, was murdered, most likely by drug smuggler s. The people of Cochise County support the state’s immigration law because we want this violence to end. Understandably, we get frustrated and disheartened when the White House, which has failed to secure the border for generations, sues us for trying to fill the legal vacuum. The administration’s suit makes several claims. For one, it argues that only the federal government has jurisdiction over immigration. But that’s a strange argument, given that federal agencies regularly work with state and local gov ernments on cross -border crimes. Senior officials at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have also argued that state and local law enforcement officers are able to make arrests only for criminal, rather than civil, violations of immigration la w. Criminal violations include aiding illegal immigration or re - entering the country after deportation; civil violations include overstaying a visa or simply being here illegally. But this places an absurd burden on my deputies and me.

Under the law, if I see people I suspect of being in the United States illegally, I already have to decide whether there is probable cause that they are here illegally. (Contrary to what its critics say, the law doesn’t allow me to question anyone = want, and I have no desire to do so.) Whether illegal aliens committed a crime to enter this country, or a civil offense to remain unlawfully, they are still breaking the law, and S.B. 1070 is Arizona’s solution to help the federal government hold them accountable without becoming embroiled in confusion that enables individuals to fall through the cracks. At the same time, it assures the standards of probable cause and reasonable suspicion are applied throughout the process. Of course, the law’s critics prefer to think that any stat e-level effort to control illegal immigration is racially motivated, and that the law is just an invitation for us to racially profile Americans and legal residents of Hispanic descent. For example, =’ve had more than one person ask me, sneeringly, “What d o illegal immigrants look like?” =n response, = tell them it’s not really what they look like as much as what they do that concerns me. Among other things, they generally run off into the desert when they see our officers approach. Citizens and legal resid ents don’t normally do that. What’s more, such critics have a strange impression of what law enforcement officers along the border actually do. In Cochise County, my deputies and I often have to travel many miles to respond to a resident’s call for assistance. The last thing we have t ime to do is harass law -abiding people. Indeed, these days we have even less time, as the law has opened up a wave of suits against my office and other sheriff’s offices along the border from immigrant advocacy groups — so many that other sheriffs and I fo rmed a legal defense fund, the Border Sheriffs Association , to help our departments counter them. Neither my fellow sheriffs nor I believe the law is a silver bullet, but w e do believe it is an important tool. =t’s up to the Supreme Court to decide whether we can use it.